With the cancellation of Dreamblade officially announced, it feels right to write for the relatively distant future. If there aren’t enough players right now, I can hope that this article will be most useful to people who are just learning months or years after this article was written who find it in some archive somewhere. This will walk through the basic strategy that I feel is important for someone new to the game to grasp as quickly as possible.
The first part of a game of Dreamblade is choosing your pieces. The most obvious step is making sure that you have a reasonable curve (distribution of costs). You’ll want some pieces at almost every cost, as one of your primary goals in building your band is to ensure that you’ll be able to spend as many spawn points as possible on every turn throughout the game. The easy, basic way to do this is just to start by grabbing a piece or two of every cost, but the better, more thorough method is to plot out your spawn progression.
The spawn progression is a chart of what piece or combination of pieces you can play on each possible spawn roll for the first few turns. It’s a very good idea to make sure that there are no combinations of rolls that will result in you wasting more than 1 spawn on any roll by turn 3. This is something you can do for any band without actually playing. Look at your band and go through the numbers. Ask yourself what you’d play if a 5 is rolled, then 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, and 11. I find it easiest to just set the pieces out in a row and push the pieces I’d play forward; then I can easily work through the next turns. I start by assuming 5 on turn 1, then work through every turn 2, then 6, etc. It doesn’t take an unreasonably long time to do this for the first 3 turns.
Once you’ve made sure that you can’t get too far behind early in the game, because you have a reasonable spawn progression, make sure that you’ll be able to play pieces every turn that you’ll have to. You don’t want to run out of pieces to play early. You need to have a reasonable number of pieces that cost more than 7, even if they make it harder to fill out those early turns. If your pieces cost less, try to at least have good ways to spend spawn without spawning pieces, like Virtuous Maiden or Voodoo Manipulator.
You will want to pay attention to aspect costs while you’re building. A band can have three or four different aspects, but there are times when you have to be careful with it. If you have anything that costs more than one of an aspect you’ll want to make sure you’re going to enable that piece early, which is to say that you’ll consistently play other pieces of that aspect before you would want to play that piece. Also, it is important to enable any aspect that you have a lot of pieces of early, but it is also occasionally important not to pay too many different aspect costs in the first few turns. Paying one extra spawn for an extra aspect on the second turn isn’t that big of a deal, but if you’ve played 4 aspects and your opponent has played one on the third turn, you’re already basically down 3 spawn on your opponent, which is an entire piece. It can be very hard to make up for that. If you have 4 aspects in your band, you shouldn’t plan to need to pay all the aspect costs early in the game. Later on, that one extra spawn cost will represent a much lower portion of the total spawn on the board.
After all the cost concerns are out of the way, we can talk about what you’ll really be building for: having a band that does something. You want to make sure that your pieces work together in a way that makes some sense. Look for some internal synergy or game plan. That plan can be as simple as, “all of these pieces are relatively hard to kill” to something more focused like, “I want to assemble a combination of two Ambush pieces in the same cell and way to pull my opponent’s pieces into that cell as fast as possible.” My favorite has generally been, “These pieces win fights early because they’re cheap and efficiently priced, and later on they’ll allow my few more powerful pieces to attack multiple times by using Skirmish and Advance.”
Once you know what you want your band to do, you need to make sure that it doesn’t lose because of what it doesn’t do. Make sure that you have multiple ways to consistently do 10-15 damage to a single piece. Make sure that you have pieces that can enter a cell with a Fleshless Reaper and assemble enough power to kill it. Make sure there aren’t any single pieces that your band will lose to, especially if you know you’ll be likely to play against them. Also, make sure you have some way to utilize blades that you roll. For many bands, a blade is the best result on a die. When it’s the worst result for you, you’ll be at a significant disadvantage, since all the other results will be the same. While you’re at it, make sure you aren’t paying too much for weak pieces with blade abilities when you have no way to roll enough blades to trigger them all at once. Combine pieces with blade abilities with pieces without blade abilities as much as possible. One of the most elegant features of this game is the way that that simple goal encourages so much diversity.
Once you’ve built a band that does something and doesn’t have any gaping holes, you should be ready to try it out. In most games when you roll over a 7 or so on the first turn, the first question that should come up is, “Is it better to play multiple cheap pieces or one expensive piece on the first turn?” The question of what to play on the first turn is often a lot more difficult than you’d expect. If you play more pieces than your opponent you’ll almost certainly win a turn or two before they catch up, but if your opponent’s piece can easily kill or disrupt yours and yours can’t do anything back, you might never get control of the center back from them. I would say that it is never correct to play one passion piece rather than multiple cheaper pieces because the passion piece will have relatively low defense and life, which means that you’ll be down on turns because you played only one piece, and then the opponent can disrupt your entire board in one moderate attack. A reasonable starting point might be that you want to play the highest total defense that you can on the first turn. There are a few minor exceptions to this. Pieces like Rainforest Shaman than benefit you more the longer they’re in play want to come out earlier than they would otherwise and it can be worth sacrificing something to get them into play early.
Having made the safest opening play you can by playing as much defense as possible, the next question you’ll be faced with is how you want to move on the second turn. This is the subject of a lot of thought and discussion, and the conclusion has only been that it’s an extremely difficult and significant decision. The best guidelines I can give are that you want to avoid getting into a confrontation on your opponent’s side of the board and you want to encourage them to get into a confrontation on your side of the board, even if it looks to favor them initially. You’ll want to encourage confrontation in the center only if your pieces are better in combat than theirs. Compare bands. Attempt to determine who is favored by having the game go long. If that’s you, all you have to do is try to tie the turn and not risk your position, you should play very cautiously. If it’s them, you’ll need to establish a favorable position early and try to hold it. In most cases this will not be done by running forward to steal turns. It will be done by collecting your early forces to win combats in the center in the beginning of the game.
The primary question at this stage, but one that players rarely think to ask, is, “do I want to move a piece into the center of the board?” The vast majority of players will just move there, since it’s the most influential space. Also, not moving there will almost guaranty losing that turn. However, moving there commits you to being engaged on the third turn. Before moving to the center you need to consider whether engaging there is advantageous for you if you go first and if you go second on the next turn. This means you need to be able to plan a full turn ahead. The game will often require that. If you go first on the third turn and you plan to shift then strike in the center, remember that you will probably not want to destroy their pieces because they will get deathblows and they will be able to attack your pieces without fear of deathblows on their turn. Striking when you’re first on the third turn can be extremely powerful, but it can also be devastating, think carefully about which it will be. Then think about how attacking for them would be. Against a surprising number of players, you can count on them to shift-strike in the center whenever possible, regardless of whether it’s advantageous for them, especially if they moved into the center on the second turn, so if they go first, is it good or bad for you if they just make the obvious shift-strike? If both of these situations are good for you, move in. More likely, it will be good for you to threaten the center without having any of your pieces threatened in the center. This is especially excellent if you go second, as your opponent will not be able to attack OR claim the center on their turn and you’ll match them on points by winning the third turn, which will also give you control of the middle of the board.
After you’ve determined which cells you want your pieces to end in, you have to decide which pieces you want in each of those cells. The guiding tension for this decision is the desire not to risk your best pieces against the desire to have your best pieces represent you in battle. This follows a similar guideline to the first turn play. You want pieces with a high defense to power ratio forward because those will be hardest for your opponent to attack and pieces with a high power-to-defense ratio back, where they’ll be ready for a counterattack. This plan can make it difficult to attack your opponent when you’re first, but it is the safest way to play. The game is about risk management, so the safest play is almost always correct. It’s easiest to win by capitalizing on bad luck following an opponent’s high variance (risky) play.
The most common difficult decisions that will come up through the rest of the game are how to position your pieces when you are forced to shift twice and whether to attack in later turns. When shifting, the primary goal is to keep your pieces out of striking range while threatening as many cells as possible. Create places that your opponent can’t move without risk of a devastating play on your part. Often you can win turns easier by making it so that your opponent can’t move to scoring cells than by moving to them yourself. Sometimes if you don’t move to the center your opponent won’t be able to either because the risk is too great, but if you were there they would be able to because there’s a higher payoff in trapping your piece.
Most decisions about attacking come down to fairly straight forward calculations of odds, but remember to account for turns in the future. If an attack won’t completely clear a cell, all pieces will be stuck there. When the pieces are engaged there, other pieces will often be drawn to the action. Consider what pieces will end up in that cell in the next few turns, potentially including pieces that aren’t in play yet and whether the conclusion of the conflict in that cell will be beneficial to you. Also, be sure that the worst case scenario isn’t devastating, especially when the best case is only moderately advantageous.
You’ll also want to pay a lot of attention to how you use your blades and in what order you resolve your attacks. This often comes down to thinking through what would happen if you got an expected number of blades in each cell, but there are some guidelines that may let you rule out certain possibilities. As a rule, it’s best to attack in places where you’ll have the easiest decisions first so that you have as much information as possible to make your more difficult decisions. If there are two pieces you might want to disrupt to the same cell, it’s best to attack the one you’d rather disrupt their first so that you can safely disrupt the other there if you miss the first attack. If you plan to use an ability like Advance or Skirmish, you’ll probably want to attack in those cells first to get the pieces you’re moving into other cells to use their power multiple times. If you’re planning to use an ability like Expel, you’ll probably want to attack in that cell last so that you can see exactly how much damage is on every piece before potentially expelling them into other new combats.
These guidelines should help you play competently and will certainly help you know where you need to pause and think and what to think about. The game is extremely difficult to play formulaically the most important advice I can give if you’re trying to play well is to stop and think about every decision you can. Even after you’ve played one band against another band several times, little changes can easily change the strategy you want to employ. Feel free to discuss these guidelines on our message boards.
